


stay on the line until your voice feels nearer

by guttersvoice



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alien Iwaizumi Hajime, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-05-26 01:23:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14989682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guttersvoice/pseuds/guttersvoice
Summary: Oikawa Tooru is five years old when the falling star drops from above right into his front garden.Years later, Iwaizumi confesses to him, but not in the way he's hoping for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> man i havent posted fic in nearly a year and im terrified to post this tbh but im doing it anyway !! 
> 
> this was supposed to be a tiny oneshot but its.............. gotten out of hand. who knows how long its gonna wind up. have this for now, though

Oikawa Tooru is five years old when the falling star drops from above right into his front garden.

It's by coincidence, probably, that he's looking out of his bedroom window, wide-eyed and fixated on the sky at that exact moment; that he couldn't sleep and sought, led by child’s instinct, to fix that by looking at the stars and feeling their distant songs echo inside his little head. Much, much later, he might dramatically claim that it was a destined moment, but if he was honest with himself, might have to admit that even if he hadn't been watching, things might have worked out the same anyway.

The star is a line of bright pale green that becomes a flash in the blink of an eye, lighting up the street below and winking out instantly.

When his eyes adjust back to the dark, there's something glowing in the front garden.

It's late, and Tooru shouldn't even be awake, but - he has to! Something just fell from space right into his garden! How can he pass up on the chance?

So he pushes his toes into his slippers, tugs a blanket over his shoulders like a cape, and pads down the stairs quietly as he can, and slips out of the front door and across the grass.

It's only tiny. The glow is fading already, and by the time Tooru picks it up, it's dim - just a dark, smooth rock that fits perfectly into the five-year-old’s palm. It's the darkest blue he's ever seen, and as he stares he can make out more and more tiny bright points suspended in the colour.

Like a chunk of the night sky in his hand.

When he makes it back to bed, he falls asleep fast, still clutching the rock full of stars. If it hadn't still been there in the morning, he'd have written it off as a dream, but as it was - he knows what he saw, and he has proof, which he stashes carefully in the drawer in his bedside table.

From that day, Oikawa Tooru’s interests are twofold: extraterrestrial life, and the boy his age that moves in across the road that very morning.

Iwaizumi Hajime ignores him when he asks if he likes aliens, favouring the line of ants marching across the pavement that he's squatted to peer at.

In fact, he doesn't seem to be interested in Tooru at all until he stumbles over Iwaizumi’s name and substitutes it with ‘Iwa-chan’. It's at this point that the newly-branded Iwa-chan’s head snaps up to look at him, eyebrows drawn together in a frown.

“My name is Iwaizumi,” he says. “Not Iwa-chan.”

There’s something in the crease between this boy's brows and the odd green of his eyes that Tooru decides he likes, so he just smiles as wide as he can, in the way that makes people coo over him and give him treats.

“It's a nickname,” he insists. “Since we're going to be best friends. It's cute!”

Those eyebrows draw ever closer.

“Best friends?” Iwazumi repeats. “I don't think so.”

He stands up, and there's an ant crawling in helpless patterns around on his hand, and Tooru recoils a little.

Iwaizumi pays him no heed, immediately walking away, back to his own house, but not before Tooru hears him mumble, “It's just an ant, Dummykawa.”

Which means they both have nicknames, which means they absolutely are going to be best friends.

-

And they are. Tooru is proven time and time again to be right: about their friendship, about volleyball, about - well. Iwaizumi still, all the way into high school, won't agree with him on the alien thing, but he's sure of it, insistent, when it comes up. He knows it, and he can provide plenty of evidence from books and documentaries, not to mention reams from the internet.

He never brings up the way the stars sing to him, or the chunk of sky he keeps in his drawer. Those things feel silly and objective, not something he can present as fact like he can with the rest of his hard evidence.

But just because Iwaizumi won't listen doesn't mean Tooru isn't right. He's right about everything else, after all.

Almost everything else.

Not his knee.

But he'd had Iwaizumi to tell him he was being stupid, then; to calm him down and slow him and steady him. His Iwa-chan, he’d sigh, adoringly. His rock.

And his Iwa-chan rolls his eyes and throws something at him and calls him a rude nickname, and the moment always pass, and Tooru doesn't have to get caught up thinking about just how much he does rely on Iwa-chan to be that for him. How much he really does adore him, actually, if he thinks about it. Which he doesn't, so it's fine - so there's nothing to worry about except volleyball, his supply of bread and persuading his friends on the existence of extraterrestrial life.

That last one has proven difficult over the years, but he’s not about to give up just yet. It’s no weirder an interest than Iwa-chan’s fascination with bugs. Admittedly, he’s done a lot less of that lately, but when they were kids it had seemed like almost an obsession, building his way up from the ant he’d picked up that first day, through moths and cicadas and rhinoceros beetles - and worse things like millipedes and spiders, and the like. He never did anything with them, didn’t take them home or collect them or pull them apart like some kids; just observed them carefully with that special Iwa-chan brand of seriousness. And then, inevitably, set them free, citing their short lifespans as a reason to pity them.

It never made sense to Tooru, and he hated - hates - to watch their awful little legs move, and their bodies wriggle, and their wings buzz, but -- well, everyone needs flaws, and Iwa-chan’s are his weird bug thing, and his awful fashion sense, and how awfully mean and rude he is, and, and actually if Tooru starts listing, he’ll never finish and simply expire, and depriving the world of someone like himself would be a dreadful shame.

Tooru’s flaw is probably Iwaizumi.

Even though he keeps his eyes scrunched closed in disgust during the alien autopsy parts of Tooru’s documentaries, and argues against the facts all of the experts present in them, he still watches them with him, after all.

Sometimes, when they don’t have time to anticipate the gore, Tooru takes the opportunity to slide his hand into Iwa-chan’s. It usually gets him elbowed in return, or a scathing eyeroll, but sometimes he doesn’t pull away, and Tooru’s heart gets to skip a beat.

It’s the silly, everyday stuff that he can’t follow through on, because he relies on Iwa-chan’s presence too much, and he’s happy as they are.

Maybe part of it’s because he still holds on to that vain childish thought that the two of them are going to be together forever; that he’s going to marry this boy someday because it just seems like the obvious thing to do. It’s not a conscious thought - he’s not doodling their names in hearts or daydreaming wedding plans. Just an assumption, a fact he’s never thought to question.

The idea that Iwa-chan might not feel the same is unthinkable, so Tooru simply doesn’t think about it.

For Iwaizumi’s eighteenth birthday, Tooru has an array of gentle, unobtrusive plans for his best friend, not all of them self-centred, but the other boy seems distracted all day. A little vague and distant.

It’s the same as if he were just coming down with a cold (which happens so rarely but always hits him so hard; his immune system seems to overcompensate every time), but it’s his birthday, so Tooru won’t stand for it; pouts and tugs on Iwa-chan’s sleeve every time he seems to be thinking about anything other than having fun and feeling good and paying attention to Tooru. And class, he supposes.

Tooru already cancelled practice in advance, prioritising celebrating, but he’s considering rescinding that by lunchtime.

“Do you want to work out whatever’s bothering you in the gym this afternoon, Iwa-chan?” He twirls a lock of hair as prettily as he can. Not that Iwaizumi is looking to notice.

“Huh?” Sometimes, Iwa-chan sounds as stupid as Tooru so often says he looks. Now is absolutely one of those times, but at least he has his attention. “I thought there was no practice today?”

“We-ell, at least you’re keeping up with that much,” Tooru teases, tongue poking out cute as he can manage, and then sighs over-dramatically. “You’ve been off all day, I thought a little physical stimulation might get some blood to your brain for once.”

He is imagining the slight flush to Iwa-chan’s cheeks at the suggestion of physical stimulation, he tells himself sternly.

“What - no --” Iwaizumi does seem flustered, but not in the way Tooru might have liked. “No, I’ve got plans already.”

That hits Tooru like a brick; like something cold and heavy dropping from his throat into his stomach. Iwa-chan has plans, and Tooru had no idea? Has something changed that he wasn’t aware of until now? Is that why he’s been so distant from Tooru today? Does Iwa-chan have a --

But his dread must show on his face - at least enough for the one person who can always see through him to notice - because Iwaizumi rolls his eyes and flicks him hard in the forehead.

“With you, Shittykawa, don’t go looking like I’ve broken your heart like that,” he jokes, and Tooru fights down the heat rising in his cheeks. It wasn’t heartbreak or anything, just surprise.

He’s even more surprised now, though, but his chest feels light and warm and glowing, instead.

“Well of course I’d be heartbroken if my darling Iwa-chan had planned something on his birthday without me,” he laughs, layering on the dramatics, one hand cast across his forehead as he tips dangerously back in his seat. “But really! What if I’d planned you a surprise and we’d overlapped?”

“Did you plan me a surprise?” Iwaizumi is straightforward as ever even as his hand reaches out to steady Tooru’s chair, and Tooru has to pout at him.

“No,” he admits. “You hate surprises on special days. You like watching movies and eating good food and being comfortable and boring.”

Iwa-chan gives him that knowing, told-you-so look he’s far too familiar with, but there’s a warmth and gratitude in there that gives Tooru a smug little internal victory.

“Where are we going, then? There’s no big kaiju movies out right now, or even normal over-the-top stupid action, I checked a hundred times -” Well, like three times, but he keeps up with that type of news anyway, if only so he can one day be a step ahead of Iwaizumi and surprise him with something he doesn’t yet know about. Not that he’s ever managed it.

Iwaizumi raises his eyebrows and his lips twitch into the tiniest smile. It’s a look he doesn’t use often, but Tooru knows what it means, recognises that hint of a glitter in his eyes. He pouts, which changes absolutely nothing. He’s not going to find out via Iwaizumi telling him, that’s for sure, not now that he’s expressed curiosity. Probably Iwaizumi already told him while he was paying attention to something else that seemed far more important at the time, and he’s forgotten already, and this is his rightful punishment.

Tooru heaves a sigh, over-dramatised and world-weary and - because it is Iwaizumi’s birthday, after all - obviously giving up, defeated. He’s capable of patience.

-

After school closes out, Iwaizumi doesn’t wait for any of their friends to wish him a happy birthday, or anything. He changes into his shoes and just -- leads Tooru out of school grounds and straight to the train station.

“Can’t I even go home and dress myself up nice for your special day, Iwa-chan?” he whines, but Iwaizumi just shakes his head. Not like Tooru had really been expecting him to change his mind.

“No time,” he explains shortly. He _is_ walking faster than usual. But he’d implied it wasn’t a movie, so - Tooru’s mind rushes ahead at a thousand miles a minute. Does he have a reservation somewhere? With just the two of them? Even if it’s something pricey or exclusive, and even if they are best friends, it seems unusual for it to just be the two of them, rather than inviting any of their friends along - at least Hanamaki and Matsukawa - especially for a birthday celebration, no matter how much Iwaizumi prefers things quiet.

But they were still in their school uniforms, after all, with no time or seemingly inclination to change, Tooru reminded himself firmly as they got on the train, before his mind could leap from ‘reservation’ to ‘restaurant’ and from ‘just the two of us’ to somewhere far more dangerous than he was willing to acknowledge he was capable of considering.

To shut his brain up, he talked through the train journey, about anything and everything; about today’s schoolwork, about the team, about how it was so mean of Iwaizumi not to let him go home and at least get his present and fix his hair --

Iwaizumi is somehow distracted enough to tell him his hair looks great today with nothing but honesty in his tone, and that’s enough to shut Tooru up for the last few minutes until their stop, pink-faced and a little dizzy. He has to be dragged by the wrist off the train, but Iwaizumi only seems to be the regular level of exasperated with him, so he doesn’t worry about it too much.

He lets go of Tooru’s wrist once it’s clear enough he’s actually paying attention enough to follow, and the band of skin where they’d made contact tingles from the sudden lack of content, almost cold even in the warm summer air.

It’s only a short walk to their destination, but it’s clear enough on the approach at least where they’re going: the huge white-and-glass building is pretty unmistakable.

“Why’s the aquarium such a big secret?” Tooru asks, doing his level best to keep his incredulous pout as cute and wide-eyed as possible.

“It wasn’t a secret.” Which means Tooru was right and he was just being kept in the dark to make him antsy and flustered. “Just kinda funny watching you squirm and wonder sometimes.”

“Mean Iwa-chan!” Tooru smacks him in the arm. “Bully!” Not too hard: it is his birthday, after all, and he’s got that tiny hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes are such a soft green in the sunshine that he can almost imagine there’s affection there as well as amusement.

Plus he’s being taken on an aquarium date, which has to count for something, whether or not the other boy is thinking of it as a date or not.

Which he might, seeing as how he’s already paid for their tickets in advance.

They get plastic wristbands so they can go in and out if they need to - Iwaizumi’s is a bit too tight, and Tooru can see him itching to loosen it or gnaw it off or something silly, and resolves to hold his hand only if he catches him at it. They’ve got a slot to meet and feed the penguins, even, which he assumes is why Iwaizumi was in such a hurry.

Was he really that excited for something like that? A thought strikes him, and as they approach the first - small, introductory - tanks, he bumps their shoulders together, grinning bright.

“Could it be, Iwa-chan?” He barely gets a grunt in response; Iwaizumi is ducked down a little to watch a selection of very small, brightly-coloured fish swim patternlessly around their tank, staring unblinking, with the intensity he’d usually hold for the nasty bugs he puts so much time into. Which only confirms Tooru’s thought, of course.

He bites back a giggle and bumps Iwaizumi again.

“Have you finally moved on from your awful, wriggling, segmented first love onto a prettier, wetter object of affection?”

This earns him an extremely tired Look, and an eye roll, so he’s right, or at least partially.

“Something like that,” Iwaizumi replies, after long enough that it takes Tooru a second to remember what he’s responding to.

His ears are red, which is as close to a full-body blush as Iwaizumi gets, and Tooru isn’t sure what _that_ means, but he’s happy to take it as a victory nonetheless.

Iwaizumi spends twice as long at each tank as even the most fascinated child, peering steadily at each occupant visible through each of the steadily larger windows, and Tooru doesn’t even have the heart to whine that he wants to get to the bigger, more exciting fish, not with that genuine interest written so clearly and openly across his best friend’s face. Not with him letting Tooru take as many photos as he wants, with and without himself in them. Not with the way he nods so seriously and thoughtfully whenever Tooru reads out the facts on the signs beside each tank, like it’s the most important information in the world.

If he’d known he’d get such reactions, he might have read aloud the books about insects he’d brought home from the library as a kid - refusing to look at the covers, only shoving them into Iwaizumi’s startled hands and loudly voicing his disgust over any gratitude the other boy tried to display.

No, that was impossible. Way too gross.

Why couldn’t Iwaizumi have been into fish this whole time, instead of creepy-crawlies? At least most of them aren’t too unpleasant to look at, and there’s no chance of him trying to make Tooru hold them against his will.

(There’s an interactive rock pool area, a little way in, and Iwaizumi holds every single crab they’ll allow, while Tooru perches ever-so-delicate and prim on the damp rock and tries not to grimace too much when he’s encouraged to touch. He takes a selfie with the big cartoon fish on the wall instead and tries to use covering it in stickers as an excuse to ignore the attendant talking Iwaizumi through all his damp, many-legged friends for as long as he can.)

(It turns out starfish just feel sort of like rocks. Which makes sense, because in Tooru’s experience, so do stars.)

He has to hold fish to feed the penguins, too, but that’s absolutely worth it, because they are simply too adorable and he can never in a million years hate them, especially when they’re excitable and bouncy and vying for his attention just because he has a little food.

They vie more for Iwaizumi’s attention. It’s inexplicable - even the penguin handler doesn’t seem to know what to make of it. The penguins just seem to adore him, swarming him a little and bumping into his shins so he has to stay stock-still to keep from accidentally kicking any of them. He has on that expression of sort of embarrassed disbelief that Tooru sees so rarely: the last time was when someone had casually mentioned Dearest Kyoken-chan’s very obvious crush on Iwaizumi and then they’d all had to spend the rest of the lunch hour persuading him that _yes, really_.

Tooru’s pretty sure Iwaizumi still doesn’t really believe them, despite it being objective truth, but he’s not about to complain about having less competition.

Not that there could ever be any contest for someone being more important to Iwaizumi than him, he reminds himself firmly, as the increasingly flustered penguin handler does her best to separate her flock from their and his object of affection.

They’re faster than their waddling gait would suggest; they keep scuttling around her and back to Iwaizumi, and Tooru has never seen anything more adorable or relatable in his life. He takes as many photos as he can and sends a choice few to the entire team.

Or tries to: apparently the signal inside the building is nowhere near enough for him to connect to the internet. Which explains the lack of responses since they entered the aquarium - not even mocking ones from Makki, calling it a date. Not that he hasn’t been thinking of it as such, but no one else is allowed to unless Iwaizumi’s okay with it.

Tooru sighs, deep and slow and resigned, knowing no one is paying enough attention to ask him what’s wrong anyway. He looks up, wonders how much water is on top of him right now, and then back at Iwaizumi, who seems to almost have extracted himself from the penguin enclosure to rejoin Tooru, and whose ears are still very pink, and decides it’s worth waiting and letting his messages send later.

When they reach the biggest tank in the building, the room is empty aside from the two of them, and the fish.

The water casts blue light and soft, dark shadows across the planes of Iwaizumi’s face, and as he takes in the sight of that expanse of glass and water, for once there’s no crease between his eyebrows.

Tooru can’t find anything clever to say, in the quiet of that blue room, after managing to take a - slightly shaky - picture of this unusually serene Iwa-chan. So the two of them just stand there for a while, watching the life in motion spread out in front of them, caught in a sense of quiet awe. At some point, their hands find each other, fingers catching and winding together naturally, and neither of them say anything of it even as they go through the rest of the place - as before, but connected there, just for a little while.

He forgets to take any more pictures.

Iwaizumi tries to sweep through the gift shop without any fuss or bother, but there is no way Tooru is letting him get away with that. He treated Tooru to this entire experience, and it is his birthday after all, so he’s basically legally obligated to accept a gift bought for him.

It is, of course, a penguin. It’s soft and squishy and he bumps it into Iwaizumi’s shoulder and face and gives it a silly voice - “I love you, Iwa-chan!” - and insists that Iwaizumi names it as soon as they’re out the door.

“Uh,” Iwaizumi stalls a little, clearly lost for ideas. The sun is low in the sky, lighting him orange in stark contrast to the blue inside. “Penguin...san?”

Tooru purses his lips, and shakes his head with as much stern disapproval as he can summon.

“Have some imagination, Iwa-chan, I am begging you -  for once.”

Iwaizumi holds the penguin up to eye level, appraising it carefully.

“He loves me, you say?” he asks, slow and thoughtful.

“He said it, not me!” Tooru insists, pointing an accusing finger at the penguin. He can’t hold the giggles in, though. “He thinks the woooorld of you and will never leave you alone because he loves you soooo much.”

“Then -” Iwaizumi’s eyes shift from the toy bird to the pouting boy beside him. The sun’s hitting his eyes at a funny angle, so they look too-bright, almost reflective, and greener than ever. “Since it’ll be nice to have one who loves me, and who’ll never insult my intelligence or looks or any of my other personal qualities, I’ll call him Tooru.”

Tooru - the real one, not the toy penguin - gapes.

“No!”

Iwaizumi nods solemnly.

“That’s not fair - you don’t even call _me_ Tooru!”

“Too late. That’s his name now.”

Tooru-the-boy wails in anguish. Tooru-the-penguin gets tucked into Iwaizumi’s schoolbag. His little beak is poking out and it’s adorable. It’s ridiculous, of course, to resent an inanimate object he himself bought as a gift, and yet --

He pouts at it. And continues pouting all the way to the train station, and when he pulls out his phone on the train to check his slew of messages and make sure everyone’s super jealous of what an amazing time they had today without any of them.

He only stops pouting when he goes to take a travel selfie for the end of the day and finds the other Tooru pressed up against his face.

“Seems he takes after you in a few ways,” Iwaizumi says, completely deadpan, but he can’t meet Tooru’s eyes and his ears are red.

He’s trying to cheer him up, Tooru realises, even though he was sulking over something so silly in the first place. There’s a rush of gratitude that feels like a whole roaring ocean in his chest, and he tugs Iwaizumi into the picture as well. They take five from various angles, and they’re some of his favourites from the whole day, he thinks, even if the other boy is doing his usual thing of not making eye contact with the camera.

“So I’m supposed to be having a meal at home tonight,” Iwaizumi begins, once Tooru is done and Tooru is back in his bag, and photos are being sent out to not just their own team members, but all the members of other teams whose numbers he’s managed to get, one way or the other.

(none for Ushiwaka, whose number he keeps deleting, and which keeps making its way back onto his contact list anyway)

(when he finds out who keeps doing that he’s going to go to jail. because he will have committed grievous bodily harm. he can only hope iwa-chan will be around when that day comes, to restrain him)

(he can’t imagine not having iwa-chan around)

Iwaizumi is still talking.

“But I kinda…” he trails off, scratches the back of his neck, a little awkward. “I don’t know. Do you want to just - get convenience store food and eat it on the hill, instead?”

Tooru doesn’t have to ask what Iwaizumi means - there’s plenty of hills around, sure, but there’s only one that they’ve climbed hundreds of times, apart and together, for countless reasons, from runaway attempts to meteor showers to so many failed attempts to catch UFOs. It’s not technically a place that belongs to anyone but nevertheless it’s - their space. That Iwaizumi wants to spend the evening there instead of with his family could probably be worrying if he chose to look at it from that angle, but it’s much easier to just be happy about getting to monopolize his best friend’s time.

“Well, I’ll be sad to miss out on Iwa-chan’s mama’s cooking,” he pretends to deliberate. Iwaizumi elbows him in the side and he collapses in laughter. “I’d love to - my treat, though, okay? And I get to stop at mine and get your present on the way.”

Iwaizumi pretends to think about it too, and eventually nods his agreement.

-

Iwaizumi makes sure Tooru buys himself real food, not just bread, and waits outside with the carrier bag for a good ten minutes while Tooru fusses over his hair as well as grabbing the present.

He doesn’t seem impatient or irritated when Tooru emerges, once again flawlessly put-together.

“Ever steadfast and patient,” he compliments him as they start walking up the path around and behind Iwaizumi’s house. “My Iwa-chan; my rock.”

This gets him an eyeroll, of course, but at least an amused one, he thinks.

“Just in a good mood,” Iwaizumi reassures him. “Any other time and I’d be up the hill and eating your food already.”

“That sounds more like you,” Tooru agrees cheerily, although they both know Iwaizumi values Tooru’s health too highly to actually eat more than a mouthful or two of his food in retaliation. Iwaizumi bumps him with his shoulder, clearly trying to seem grumpier than he’s feeling; it just makes Tooru laugh.

It’s a short walk, but with the time it took them to ride the train and buy food as well, the sun has almost fully set by the time they’re sat on the little ridge they’ve so often occupied, since they were kids and not really allowed to go off unsupervised to somewhere so isolated. The streetlights below and the half-moon above are plenty of light to eat by, though, so the sun paints the sky red and then winks out below the horizon without much fanfare.

It’s quiet, aside from the cicadas, and the distant singing from the stars that Oikawa learned from an early age no one else could hear. The air’s still warm, and where they are there always feels like there’s more of a stillness than anywhere else near.

The kind of quiet that he, for once, doesn’t want to break.

Peaceful, he supposes, sipping at his iced tea and watching the sky. It’s habitual now, to check for dark or bright shapes between him and the stars, and he’s caught Iwaizumi doing it too on plenty of occasions. That, he supposes, is his fault, for dragging him out alien-hunting so many times. They never spot anything, but they still look, even if Tooru isn’t actively making them.

“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi starts, breaking the silence between them almost hesitantly.

There’s something about his tone of voice. Something soft and cautious that makes Tooru want to take it very seriously. Something that makes his breath catch a little, that he can’t define in words but feels _important_ , and -

Is Iwaizumi going to confess to him?

He does his best to stay calm, and patient, and not let his suddenly-pounding heart jump up out of his throat.

“Yeah?” He manages to keep his voice light and airy. No good if he puts too much pressure on, or something, he tells himself.

Iwaizumi’s eyes are fixed on the stars.

He visibly bites his lip, shakes his head, and gets back to finishing his bento.

Tooru can wait. He’s waited twelve years, he can wait a bit longer.

A while longer passes, and they’ve finished eating and put all their garbage back into the carrier bag, and Iwaizumi is leaning back a little to watch the sky as he sips his aloe juice.

It takes almost a full minute for Tooru to notice that he’s humming.

It probably wouldn’t have taken so long in any other circumstances, but the song echoing soft and low in Iwaizumi’s throat blends and blurs with the rest so perfectly that it’s only by proximity Tooru can tell that this noise, this particular tune that sounds so natural from Iwaizumi, seems to come so easy to him, is the same song the stars are singing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know when you go to a decent amount of effort to get a bunch of details right about a thing and then you remember that the japanese academic year starts in april and ends in march?  
> anyway please ignore that part and instead enjoy iwaizumis internal narration and also like, some of the point of this whole fic

Oikawa Tooru was Hajime’s first kiss. They were ten years old and it was clumsy and silly and sweet, and they’d come apart giggly, with cheeks burning pink. He’d felt it on his lips for hours after, and hadn’t known how to categorise it.

That wasn’t unusual. He was young, and a lot of things were hard to figure out and put into a category. Feelings were just the hardest of those.

Not that he didn’t know about feelings, in theory: their kiss had been inspired by one in a movie they’d both watched. Actually figuring out which ones he was experiencing was a little harder, sometimes. The basic ones were easy enough; laughing, crying, shouting came easy to him, and his own responses were enough to tell him what the feeling was.

But there was a flutter in his chest like fear and happiness all at once, and more besides, and the contradiction was confusing.

It only took him a few years after that to figure out that he had a crush, and by then they’d both learned that boys kissed girls, and girls had started to properly notice Oikawa - and who could blame them? - so that was that.

In his defense, he tried to move on. Had let himself look long and hard at all sorts of other people, of all shapes and sizes and genders, but in the end he was always comparing them to Oikawa, so he’d had to resign himself to the fact that no one else sparked his sticky, uncomfortable neurons to produce dopamine - _and norepinephrine_ , his traitorously accurate mind reminded him, _and oxytocin_ \- the way Oikawa Tooru did. No matter how insufferable he could be sometimes.

Maybe it had something to do with Oikawa being the first human he’d had any contact with, verbal or physical, or maybe it was a result of growing up together, or maybe the other boy was just too beautiful and charming. Resistance was futile.

Telling Oikawa that he has a crush on him, Iwaizumi thinks, as the path up behind their houses guides them closer and closer to the stars, would be a lot easier than what he’s actually about to say.

At the very least it would be a lot more believable.

He tries, first, while they’re eating; if Oikawa’s mouth is full he’ll have a few seconds to try and explain more before he gets shouted over, at least, but --

There’s something soft and encouraging in the way Oikawa responds to his name, and Hajime can’t do it, not in that moment, not right then.

He needs to. He knows. Tonight’s song is of gentle strength and encouragement and support, as well as the constant undercurrent of _please come home_ that’s been present for the last several months, that he’s been trying so hard to ignore and push away for as long. That he can’t stop hearing even when the sun is out and the rest of the song is distant and muffled by daylight.

He doesn’t realise that he’s been listening so hard that he wound up joining in until he notices that Oikawa is staring, round-eyed with surprise, which shuts him up fast. His heart pounds heavy in his chest - he’s lucky he hadn’t fallen into the song any further and started properly vocalising or harmonising, or -- anything worse. He wants to do this on his own terms, not by accident.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa breathes, sounding somehow more awed than surprised or amused, which Hajime isn’t sure how to take. “Where did you learn that?”

He can feel the crease in his forehead forming right where Oikawa always pokes him.

“What, humming?” he manages to joke, trying desperately to force the embarrassment down. “I mean, you press your lips together and try to sing anyway, I guess?”

He can feel the blush. It always starts with his ears but today it’s hot across his cheekbones and nose.

“Not that,” Oikawa physically brushes the words aside with a gesture of his hand. “The song - the actual song itself - you were--” He’s been shifting closer, leaning in with every word but here he cuts himself off and lets himself fall back into his previous sitting position.

Hajime wonders when the last time he felt this surprised and confused all at once. Maybe never? Then it’s an important emotion to log; he files the thought away to remember later.

Oikawa holds a single, shaky finger up in front of him, and jabs it directly up, pointing at the sky.

“Can you - hear them?” He asks, and Hajime’s entire understanding of the situation is turned on its side. He feels his own mouth fall open in disbelief.

“ _You_ can hear them?” He’s pretty sure the word for this one is ‘incredulous’. He’s felt it before, on a few occasions, but never quite to such an overwhelming scale. Usually just about unexpected volleyball situations.

Oikawa nods, hand falling back to his lap, then back up to run through his hair - which he never does, so this is as big a deal to him as it is to Hajime.

Well, maybe not quite as big a deal, he amends quickly.

It looks like Oikawa is about to speak, so Hajime decides fuck it, and interrupts by holding a hand up. He’s spent too long building up to this, so he needs to say it now, before Oikawa says something else to make this weirder and more complicated.

More complicated for Hajime, that is. He’s about to make this a lot weirder for Oikawa.

“You know how I moved here when we were five?” He sticks to the mental script he’s been working on for months. It’s fine if it feels like he’s changing the subject; if his tone is too casual too quickly. Oikawa frowns a little, clearly lost as to why he’d bring this up all of a sudden, but does his best to just go along with it, which Hajime is endlessly grateful for.

He nods, so Hajime can keep going.

“I never told you where I moved from, right? And my parents are always vague about it.”

Another nod, and the frown deepens a little.

“What’s this about, Iwa-chan? I--”

He interrupts by pointing. Ahead and above, and a little to their left. Does his best not to break eye contact, needs to see the whole reaction to this no matter what it is.

“Around about there,” he says. There’s a full-on furrow in Oikawa’s brow now, the kind he makes fun of Hajime for. “That’s where I was, uh, born, I guess.”

It’s a little more complicated than that, if a lot simpler than human birth, but he doesn’t really want to go into those particular details just yet.

Oikawa’s fingers press against his mouth as he follows the line of Hajime’s finger, stares at the bright, glittering, singing points hung in the darkness above them for a few seconds before returning his gaze to Hajime’s face. He’s looking very carefully, frown less intense but still so serious.

“This isn’t a joke,” Oikawa says, finally. It feels like it ought to be a question, but his tone is flat and serious, and Hajime shakes his head obediently before letting his hand fall to his side again. “This isn’t allowed to be a joke,” he clarifies. Hajime nods, understanding. “If this is a joke, the humming took it from funny to nasty real fast.”

“Yeah, speaking of that,” Hajime lets himself interrupt his own script to go off-track a little. “How the fuck can you hear them? You - I mean, you’re definitely human, so - how? Since when?”

Is it his fault, he wants to ask - they’ve had enough contact, physical and emotional, and he doesn’t exactly have any way to know if that sort of thing would have any unexpected effects on humans. There’s not exactly recorded precedent.

Oikawa hesitates, then tips his chin up a little, a sense of that arrogance he usually reserves for other people aimed at Hajime for once. It’s - fine, he tells himself, more forceful than reassuring. He knew it might upset him. He’s been lying for years, of course telling the truth would put up a wall between them, whether he likes it or not. And it’s something that’s been so important to Oikawa for so long, that he’s been lying about, so it’s perfectly reasonable if he’s mad at Hajime for this.

“Since forever?” Oikawa ventures carefully, which isn’t exactly the answer he was expecting, but it makes more sense than any other possibility. If he’d started hearing the stars sing after meeting Hajime, there’s no way he wouldn’t have told his best friend, no matter how weird it would sound to anyone who couldn’t hear them. “At least, as long as I can remember. Since before you mov- before you arrived.”

The correction is unexpected but welcome. Hajime hesitates, almost wants to drop the whole thing, but he’s started now.

“And most humans definitely can’t hear them, right, like - I don’t have my intel completely wrong?”

“Intel!” Oikawa snorts. “No, I - talked about it a lot as a kid and got told I was making things up, so I knew it wasn’t something most people could hear or something I should talk about. Besides, who would believe me?”

Hajime wants to say _I would_ , but he has to acknowledge that he’s sort of a special case, even if he wants to tell himself that he’d have believed Oikawa even if he had been a human with senses dulled, the way most humans are.

“You--” he bites his lip. “You’re taking this surprisingly well.”

Oikawa laughs, higher and more forced than usual.

“I’m really not,” he assures Hajime. “I’m really, really trying to tell myself that you’re just fucking with me. That you heard me humming it offhand one time and that this is a cruel joke and you haven’t lied to me for the last however-long about -- everything!”

He tries not to flinch, but it’s hard; his eyes drop to his hands.

“Not everything,” he does his best to say. Their friendship isn’t a lie, he wants to say. The time they’ve spent together was real. But all he can think of is a much smaller Oikawa, with leaves and twigs in his hair and a rip in his skirt, grinning brighter than any star as he led Hajime by the hand to a clearing in the woods that he insisted for years must have been caused by a UFO landing, and the way he’d rolled his eyes and denied any possibility.

“But the thing is,” Oikawa continues, voice dropping back to a lower register, though still far from calm. “I keep thinking about how the night before you showed up, I saw a star fall out of the sky, and the next day you were there.”

A falling star. It’s Hajime’s turn to stare open-mouthed. There’s no doubt in his mind that what Oikawa is describing was absolutely his landing, no matter how generic and vague a description that might have been.

“You never told me about that,” he points out.

“You never told me that you’re--” Oikawa hesitates, lips pursed and eyes sharp, like he really wants to finish the sentence but knows that saying it out loud will make it real.

“You can say it,” Hajime acquiesces.

Oikawa tips his chin up again, but there’s a familiar smug glitter in his eyes and while all may not be forgiven just yet, there’s the tiniest shred of hope remaining to him - that maybe not everything needs to change because of this.

“No,” he says, airily, pretending to inspect his nails but watching Hajime through his eyelashes. “No, I think I want to hear you say it, actually.”

Hajime pinches the bridge of his nose. Maybe some things could have changed.

He breathes out, slow and steady and calming.

“I’m an alien,” he confesses, finally.

He’d thought saying it would feel like a weight off his shoulders. It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like anything has changed, really. He’s said some words out loud that he hasn’t said before now, but that’s about it.

The disbelief and distrust in Oikawa’s eyes isn’t quite shifting to triumph just yet, but it’s there, and Hajime knows exactly how insufferable he’s going to be after this.

Provided he’s still willing to interact with Hajime, after this.

If he is, it’ll be worth any level of teasing and smug self-satisfaction.

“You’re an alien,” Oikawa half-asks, half-confirms.

“Yes.”

“And you came here, to this planet, from space, when we were five years old.”

“Yes,” Hajime confirms, then hesitates. “Well--”

Oikawa’s eyes widen again, understanding that unsurety immediately. He’s seen the rise and fall in popularity of too many weird non-human romance movies not to, and Hajime knows it.

“When I was five years old, and you were - who knows what age, I suppose!” His voice is light, forcing humour into his tone, but there’s some of that pitched-up anxiety back in there that Hajime feels the desperate urge to calm by touch; a hand on a shoulder, at least. But he should at least wait until he’s completely sure Oikawa would be okay with that again, till he tries anything.

“I mean, it depends on which solar cycles we’re measuring by?” Hajime rubs the back of his neck, shrugging. “But one year where I’m from is about five here, so - pretty much the same.”

This makes Oikawa frown, for some reason. He’d been expecting relief that at least he hadn’t been lying about his age, too; that it really is his birthday, and that there isn’t hundreds of years of difference between them. But Oikawa’s perfectly-sculpted eyebrows are turned down, and his lips are pressed thin and unsure instead of the cutesy pout he usually affects.

He’s not sure what to say to fix this. He’s not really sure what’s wrong, is the problem. It’s been a long time since he’s been this unclear on how Oikawa is feeling. Usually even when all other humans are totally unreadable to him, he can understand this particular one just fine.

Oikawa clasps his hands in his lap. Unclasps and reclasps. Hajime watches his eyes move from where one thumb presses against the other to the star-laden sky.

“So they sent the equivalent of a five-year-old to a whole new planet?” His voice is soft enough that Hajime still can’t quite figure out the emotion there. “Isn’t that kind of--”

He cuts himself off, turns to look at Hajime, head tilted and eyes thoughtful.

“Are your parents human?” It’s direct and to the point, and Hajime’s kind of grateful even if he is getting put on the spot a little. Oikawa has always been shrewd, and being asked so straightforwardly means he doesn’t have to bring it up himself.

“Ah, it’s - complicated,” he begins, but doesn’t let himself hesitate long enough for Oikawa to say anything else. “They’re technically human - they’re still people, and they still raised me, but they were sort of. Um. Made? As artificial lifeforms. To act as the standard variation of a guardian for the species I was designated.”

The terminology falls out of his mouth more easily than something like that probably should. At least, more easily than anyone who knows Hajime would expect from him.

Oikawa is frowning again, so he might as well get the rest of this part out of the way now, since he’s started.

“Usual procedure is to take the identities, genetic makeup and as much memory as can be salvaged from a recently deceased individual, or pair, or trio, or whatever is considered standard for the local society, with as few social or familial attachments as possible. And then, uh --” he bites his lip. Oikawa’s eyes are round with what he thinks is disbelief, or possibly horror, again. He has to do this. “Combine that genetic makeup to create a native appearance for the - the individual assigned to the planet. It, uh - that, and sending us young, lets us be raised and socialised appropriately for the environment we’re observing.”

He gets a slow nod for this explanation, and lets himself shut up for a minute, to allow Oikawa enough time to process this part. There’s going to have to be a lot of processing, he realises. This might take longer than he’d initially thought it was going to.

That’s fine, he realises. He doesn’t mind waiting, if it’s for Oikawa.

“Well,” Oikawa deliberates, drawing out the single syllable as long as he can. “That’s enough weird and uncomfortable detail that isn’t too similar to any of the movies and documentaries and shows I’ve made you watch that I’m at least mostly convinced this isn’t a prank.”

Hajime isn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. He keeps his mouth shut.

“I have a lot of questions that you are going to answer in explicit detail,” Oikawa states, pointing an imperious finger at Hajime. He nods. Actually, answering questions will be a lot easier than trying to go over everything unprompted, he thinks to himself. He just wishes that serious look in Oikawa’s eyes wasn’t so sharp, or so directly aimed at him. Usually it’s reserved for whoever’s on the other side of the net.

He can’t really complain, when he’s springing something so huge on him. They’ve always shared all their secrets, after all. This is sudden, and a little unfair, and he knows it.

Oikawa leans in close. His eyelashes cast soft shadows across his cheekbones, and Hajime is reminded of the other secret he’s still keeping from his best friend.

“First of all, though,” Oikawa continues, voice lower, now that he’s closer, and Hajime is struck by how easy it would be to close the gap between their mouths. Now really isn’t the time for that, he reminds himself sternly; makes himself pay attention instead of getting distracted by the sticky-wet pounding organ in his solid chest. “Prove it.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, that’s much better - I missed the usual Iwa-chan who struggles to keep up with my intellect and impulsivities,” Oikawa laughs, and it’s rude and just on the right side of not-quite-hurtful, and it’s familiar, and with that familiarity comes relief. Not everything has to change. With that light in those soft eyes, and that fond tone that surrounds the nickname Hajime has tried to fight for so long - things will be okay, he tells himself.

Oikawa sits up very straight, and tosses his head in a way that would flip his hair if he had more of it, and fixes Hajime with that smug look that means there’s no way he can refuse whatever is about to be asked of him.

“Prove that you’re telling the truth, Iwa-chan. Show me something, or do something that’s - alien!”

“Oh,” Hajime says, cleverly. “Right, yeah.”

It’s easy enough, he just has to do it slowly enough that it doesn’t give Oikawa a headache.

It gives his parents headaches, and they’re built to be able to handle him. He’s not sure what part of the human brain can’t handle it, but apparently it’s there, and he doesn’t want to push his luck, or Oikawa’s, at least not right now.

So he closes his eyes, lets himself take a deep breath, and hums on the exhale, winding his own notes into the song coming from the stars. And with the sound he lets his appearance begin to slip away.

“You already did the humming, Iwa-chan, that isn’t - oh.”

Oikawa sounds a little breathless even on the small sound he cuts himself off with. Hajime isn’t sure if that’s a good thing, but at least it means he’s started to manifest visibly.

He opens his eyes to look. There’s something in Oikawa’s expression that can only be defined as awe, and Hajime isn’t sure how he feels about that, but he supposes it makes some degree of sense. The first visible aspect is always the halos, after all, looping around his head and hands and feet.

“What...colour is that?” Oikawa asks. He really is breathless, voice dropped to a whisper. The hand that reaches up and passes through the circles of light is shaky.

“Uh,” Hajime shrugs. “I don’t think it’s one that usually exists on this planet?”

“And I can see it just fine, but it's - it’s so _weird_ , like my eyes slip past the colour of it,” Oikawa mumbles, still half-trying to touch the intangible. He sounds absolutely delighted, which is a vast improvement, so Hajime lets himself take it another step.

He opens his second pair of eyes, which earns him a gasp. That’s fair, too; he can feel how the green glow from them spills out across his face. Plus they’re a second pair of eyes. That in and of itself is pretty weird, and he knows it. Knows the third and fourth pair are even more so. Leaves those shut, for now.

For now, he tries his best to rein in the other early manifestations: he can feel the tips of his hair starting to pale, his fingernails tightening to stubby claws, and he won’t let them go any further than that if he can help it. His teeth press sharp against his tongue and the pain at least stops any of his skin from petaling.

“Are you trying to ease me into this by holding back on me?” Oikawa asks, suspicion radiating from his tone and his pout, despite the straightforward excitement and fascination in the way his eyes remain wide and flicking over every inch of Hajime; the way his hands keep twitching forward. “You don’t have to worry about me freaking out - you know I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. You know that, and you’ve held out on me this long, so you can just - just--”

He flaps his hands at Hajime in a way that’s clearly meant to be encouraging.

“I - can’t,” Hajime chokes, and he can hear his voice starting to do the layered, echoey thing that definitely is the starting sign that he’s reaching the point that leads to headaches, so he pulls it all back; closes some of his eyes and lets all but one of his halos fade. The last one rotates steadily around his head at the level of his normal, human set of eyes, a strange sort of comfort. “I mean, I could,” he clarifies. “But uh, apparently something about, uh, the way I am, it gives humans headaches to look at and hear and be around, so…”

He shrugs, apologetic, as Oikawa pouts.

“I could handle it,” he insists, folding his arms across his chest.

“I mean, my parents can’t, but go off.”

“Uuuuuuughh,” Oikawa complains. “Iwa-chan always knows what’s best for me. You’re not my mom, you know.”

He flops sideways, head falling in Hajime’s lap, and watches the sky through the unknowable glow of the remaining halo. Just like normal. Like nothing’s changed, Hajime thinks, because not much really has changed, in truth.

“So like, are you the first step of an invasion, or do you come in peace?” he asks, and Hajime snorts.

“Very peaceful, I promise. I’m - I was sent here as an observer. In our natural forms, our main source of sustenance is information, so we gather it from any planet with sentient life that’s suitable for growing up peacefully on.”

That’s pretty concise and abridged and he knows it, but it’s fine. If Oikawa wants more detail, he can ask for it.

“Are there lots of secret aliens on Earth, then?” Oikawa asks, moving on instead of demanding elaboration. He reaches to grab Hajime by the wrist, tugging his hand to rest on the back of Oikawa’s neck where he can play with his hair without messing it up too badly, just the way he likes.

“Not as far as I know,” Hajime answers easily, happy to bury his fingers in soft brown hair. “I mean, I always assumed not, but I guess you never know.”

Oikawa hums in understanding and lapses into silence for a minute or so, probably thinking about various people they know and wondering which ones aren’t as human as they seem. Hajime’s sure he would know if they’d ever encountered any others, though. Surely he’d be able to recognise other non-humans, even if he couldn’t easily identify them beyond that loose definition.

Not expecting to encounter anyone else not from Earth isn’t exactly something that would help with noticing them, he supposes, short nails scritching gently behind Oikawa’s ear.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asks after a few minutes of quiet.

“How much cooler than me all your alien friends from back home probably are,” Oikawa mumbles, audibly pouting. Hajime snorts.

“Come on,” he reassures, gently mock-punching Oikawa in the shoulder. “Even if we hadn't established that I was a tiny, barely-developed child when I came here, you know you're always gonna be my best friend no matter what, dumbass.” Best friend. He'd wanted to phrase it differently, put more importance on his feelings for the other boy, but any other option just sounded too romantic, and it was stressful enough confessing his non-human nature without anything else complicating things further. Best to let this part settle before he even considers letting himself approach that. Especially when Oikawa is this quiet about it and avoiding giving real answers to simple questions. “What are you really worrying about?”

Oikawa turns his head to make sure that Hajime can see his pout, now.

“It's nothing,” he insists, but he's not quite meeting Hajime’s eyes again.

“It's-” Hajime bites his lip. “It's, you know, reasonable if you're upset at me, for not telling you till now.”

It is reasonable, and he knows that, as much as he doesn't want it.

“It's not that!”

Oikawa sits up, affronted. Hajime’s hand is still kind of hooked on the back of his neck. Like, if he leaned forward, and tugged just a little, gently, he could  --

He pulls his hand away, lets it fall loosely at his side.

“Like, yeah, I'm pretty hurt that you hid this from me and all but - with time I can get over that. It's not exactly the kind of secret you can just go ahead and tell people, I get that! I get it, so it's fine!”

It's clearly not fine, even in the rising pitch and tilt of his voice, but it’s just as clear that Oikawa wants it to be fine, as much as Hajime does. So it's fine. They'll call it fine until it really is.

“The, the thing is,” Oikawa continues, and Hajime’s breath stutters, because this is a lot faster than it usually takes to root out the truth behind one of these sulks. “I just can't figure out a good reason why you would decide to tell me _now_.”

“I--"

Oikawa holds up a finger to silence Hajime before he can continue.

“But,” he says, and there's a wobble to his voice that’s rare in its honesty. “I can think of plenty of bad reasons.”

He reaches across Hajime to steal his drink, slowly uncapping it and taking a long, steady sip. It's such a familiar action but Hajime can’t move; his breath is coming fast and shallow and he can't quite figure out why, or how to steady it. All he can do is watch Oikawa’s mouth.

“So -" Oikawa fumbles putting the lid back on the bottle, has to try three times before he gets it right. “Are you planning physical harm of some sort towards me?”

“I'd never --” He thinks of all the times he's hit Oikawa in annoyance or out of a need to stop him from going too far. It's a reasonable guess and he knows it. There's no way for Oikawa to be sure of that without asking. “Not seriously, properly - never, I swear--"

“Okay,” Oikawa nods, and some of that sudden desperate tightness in his chest loosens. “You've got very sharp teeth, you know. I noticed.”

Of course he noticed. How could he not have; he's always had good eyes, an impressive level of observancy even compared to Hajime’s extraterrestrial ability to absorb knowledge simply through looking.

He shuffles a little closer to Hajime, and that, too, helps him relax, and breathe, a little.

“Then, are you going home soon, Iwa-chan?”

Hajime bites the inside of his cheek.

The stars’ song crescendos as if in response. He's pretty sure Oikawa can't understand the meaning of the song, but it presses on his skull, tugs at him: come home, come home.

Even if he can't understand it properly, that doesn't mean Oikawa can't hear it. He hums along for a bar or two. It sounds so different coming from a human larynx; from a human so familiar to him, no less. Still, the same feeling: come home, come home.

“I'm right, aren't I?” His voice is low in defeat, not accusatory.

“I--" Hajime’s throat is closing up.

“You can tell me.” Oikawa rests his head on Hajime’s shoulder, leaning heavy against him. “I'd rather know in advance, you know? And it's - I've already come to terms with us going to different universities. Was that you trying to ease me in, Iwa-chan? Silly.”

Somehow, quiet acceptance is worse. He'd been afraid of being yelled at, rejected, hated, but this is so much harder.

“It's not forever.” His voice is hoarse and hollow.

“You'll come back?”

He nods as Oikawa’s fingers curl around his.

“Can't leave you alone without supervision, right?”

God, he's choking up. Oikawa’s hand is warm against his, and in any other situation would be uncomfortable in the summer weather. He moves his hand to wind their fingers together properly.

“More like you can't stay away from my magnificent self.”

“Sure, sure.”

There's less awful tension in this silence: instead he just wants to cling to Oikawa and not let go.

Oikawa doesn't let go, either, even when he sits up properly again to look at Hajime. It's only at this point that he realises he's relaxed enough that his second halo is visible. He doesn't bother pulling it in, for now.

“How long are you going to be?”

The hardest question, right there. But honesty is the only real option, at this point.

“I don't know,” he answers. “I want to make it there and back as fast as I can, but--"

“How long would that be, then?” For all Hajime tends to be the practical one, always setting Oikawa straight and making sure he doesn't get tangled up in internal issues, he's lucky enough that sometimes it works the other way round. It's such an obvious way to simplify it. “How long is the shortest possible time away?”

“Uh, I don't--" Oikawa gives him the look he so often gives Oikawa, and he makes himself answer properly. “A couple of months, maybe?”

A slow nod, and then the option neither of them really want to address.

“And the longest?”

“Years.” No point beating around the bush. “Years, or never.”

Oikawa’s hand tightens around his.

“You’ll come back,” he repeats.

“I'll come back,” he promises.

Oikawa’s head rests against Hajime’s again; Hajime shivers as his halos pass through the other boy’s skull, and more when he opens his mouth to attempt to taste one.

“Wait, was that like a weird alien sex thing just there, Iwa-chan? Have I been tricked into unwittingly giving you my innocence by tonguing your rings?”

The shift back to normality - to silliness and dirty jokes - is almost jarring, but easy enough to settle back into.

“Yeah you just stole my alien virginity,” he deadpans, snorting with laughter before Oikawa can play it up and act all affronted and shocked. “No, not really, but it's pretty intimate, I guess. Wouldn't let anyone else do that.”

He feels, rather than sees Oikawa’s face heat up at that.

“Well, that's okay.” His voice is quiet and hesitant, just accepting it rather than playing along.

They're still holding hands, too.

At two halos his heart is a crystal core that glows, pulsing bright light instead of pumping sticky blood through veins, and Hajime’s a little thankful, really. Less likely that Oikawa would be able to feel that. The warmth of his own blush however is a different story, but perhaps out of self-preservation Oikawa says nothing on the subject.

He hums along with the stars and his too-human ‘come home’ is just as much of a pull as the call from above.

“When do you leave?”

“Not like I have a set schedule,” It's his own ship he’ll be taking, after all. Technically he gets to make all the decisions. “But it has to be soon. They're noisier lately because they're impatient.”

“They?” Oikawa asks, and then immediately, as understanding sets in, as the stars chime bright, “Oh!”

“Yeah,” Hajime continues, making himself say the rest before he can dwell on it too long. “So, like, probably this week.”

It's too soon, and he knows it, and he feels it in the way Oikawa squeezes his hand tight without speaking, and the way his breathing beside him slows too steady.

“Sorry,” he tries, and Oikawa shakes his head.

“You'd stay longer if you could, right?” He nods, and Oikawa takes a slow, careful breath. “Then you're not allowed to apologise, because it'll make it worse.”

The edge in his voice tells Hajime what he really means: it'll make Oikawa cry. He doesn't want that either, so he shuts up.

“You could have told me before we all planned to go to the beach together, you know.”

“I thought I'd have longer,” Hajime admits. “Plus it felt like - my birthday seemed like a good time for it, I guess.”

Oikawa makes a short huffing noise that he knows is accompanied by a pout and a glare.

“Because I’m not allowed to be mad at you on your birthday?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

They both laugh a little, soft sounds more evident by the shaking of their shoulders against one another, and he squeezes Oikawa’s hand.

A thought occurs to Hajime. One that he probably should have had already, really, and he feels like even more of a dick for not making it one of the first things he did.

He stands, slowly, with enough time for Oikawa to move his head away comfortably, not letting go of his hand. He probably could let go at this point, but - he doesn’t want to, and that’s enough.

“Iwa-chan?” There’s a hesitancy in Oikawa’s voice, and he realises his mouth has stretched itself into a wide smile.

He goes to speak, but thinks better of it; bites his lip and shakes his head, instead just tugging on Oikawa’s hand till he stands and starts to follow Hajime as he walks. He doesn’t ask again, and Hajime finds he can’t speak now that he’s started.

They’ve gone through these woods a thousand thousand times, taken every path possible, and it’s arguable that they each know all its secrets as well as each other. And in a way that’s true: even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, at least as a child, Oikawa always insisted that there was at least one particular spot - a clearing of broken branches and flattened plantlife - that must have been made like that by something extraterrestrial. Something that landed briefly and left its mark for him to discover.

He was only half right.

He recognises the direction they’re going early enough, and says nothing, but the harsh intake of breath through his teeth is enough for Hajime to know he knows where he’s being led.

The way is lit by his own halos, so it takes less than five minutes, all told, with no tripping or stumbling, and he stops them at the very edge of that space.

He speaks before Oikawa can open his mouth.

“So, I lied about something else, too,” he confesses, and then _chimes_ , a more inhuman sound than he’s ever made in front of anyone else. That alone makes Oikawa’s eyes wide, raises his eyebrows in delighted surprise.

Hajime has seen his ship unfold out of what to anyone looking would seem like nowhere - it’s always there, actually, but reduced to a one-dimensional line laid out on the ground, impossible to find with human hands and eyes - plenty of times. He keeps his eyes fixed on Oikawa’s face, instead, watches the expressions unfold across it over the few seconds the ship takes to form its own shape. The mix of awe and shock and absolute, elated triumph at being proven right, finally, after so many years, is a better birthday gift than anything Hajime could ask for.

It takes up the whole clearing, and it’s nothing like any of the drawings Oikawa ever drew as a child, or the prints and art and supposed photos he’d blu-tacked to his wall over the years. It’s dark as night, almost blue, shot through with points of light like stars, and the shape of it is impossible to completely pin down with a human’s sight - from this angle, it almost looks like a cube, fractaling endlessly outwards, or inwards, and from others it looks like a bird, or a fish, or a sphere.

To Hajime, the shape is a door, and that’s what it is.

“Motherfucker,” Oikawa says, and he sounds positively delighted. “I knew it.”

“You were right,” Hajime says, and Oikawa’s grin grows ever more smug. It’s one of his favourite things to hear, after all.

He sets his hand on the familiar, perfectly smooth surface, lets himself feel its low hum. It’s enough to encourage Oikawa to touch it too - briefly at first, drawing back at the sensation of it, though whether that’s the soft, constant buzz or the disarming feeling of the angle of where his hand sets down feeling different to what he can see, Hajime can’t tell. Then again, more sure, and steady.

The laugh that escapes the setter is a little giddy.

“I knew it,” he says again, quieter; more awe and less triumph.

Hajime runs his thumb over the one flaw in the ship’s exterior: a tiny chunk knocked out of it when he’d first landed. It’s a reminder that he can’t always expect himself to be perfect just because he’s from an advanced race. Or something. It doesn’t really matter what it means, he supposes. He’s always found it reassuring, though, somehow. A little invisible imperfection.

He _chimes_ again, a different tone this time, and all the stars caught in the night-dark of the ship move, gathering in front of them; a bright opening in the center of the door.

That helpless grin tugs at the corner of his mouth again.

“Would you like to see inside?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know, when i started writing this, i thought it might be a short little one-off thing where a lot of the details were vague and i could round it off in one or two chapters but it seems i might be in this for the long haul at this rate
> 
> hopefully at least some parts of it are still loosely-defined enough that you can enjoy filling in some blanks yourself but who knows
> 
> also if youve read this and left kudos or commented i want you to know it means the absolute world to me. im very tender and i treasure each and every one of you

Iwa-chan’s silence as he tugs at Tooru’s hand and starts leading them through the trees isn’t ominous or irritating at all. It’s a little nostalgic, if anything; he had lapses of quiet when they were younger. Sometimes when he was trying to hold in something exciting, like a present, or a trip he was being allowed to take a friend on, and didn’t want it to spill out early. Sometimes for no obvious reason, or something he couldn’t explain, which always seemed to fairly obviously be stress from Tooru’s point of view, and which never lasted too long. He’d be back to his shouty, grumpy, critical, caring, thoughtful self in no time. But usually it was just when he was focused on a new awful bug of some kind, which Tooru supposes now is because he was carefully cataloguing information about them to take back home.

Back home. He pushes the thought away, focuses on the reassuring singing from the stars that mean they’re not walking in complete silence, and on not tripping over anything - though with the rings of unnatural light floating looped around Iwaizumi’s head it’s easy enough to see plenty of their surroundings.

Which means it’s easy enough to tell the direction they’re going, and he has to bite back a too-dramatic gasp when he realises.

The landing site he’d found so long ago. The place he’d _known_ , for sure, right away, was a place a UFO had stopped. Where Iwaizumi derailed all his enthusiasm with careful logic and called him an idiot and - is now leading him in the direction of, after coming out as an alien.

He trains his face into neutrality. This might be something entirely different from what he expects.

But they arrive exactly where he expects, and Iwaizumi makes this _noise,_ like bells, but not at all like bells, ringing out silvery into the dark, and then it just - it unfolds - blossoms out from the ground, and it looks like a lotus and an insect and a flat square all at once, and he’s not really sure how it’s doing that, but it’s nothing like what he expected.

Except in one way - it’s made of solid night sky. It’s what that stone that still lives in his nightstand is from, and it’s that, more than anything else, that makes this feel right, and true. All of this.

“Mother fucker,” he says, and he’s a little breathless. This is a UFO. This is a real, actual, alien spaceship, right in front of him, within arms reach. Right where he’s always said there could have been one. He’s been right all along; it’s finally settling in that he’s been right about so much, all along. “I knew it.”

“You were right,” Iwaizumi agrees, and those three words are almost as beautiful as the harmony Iwaizumi had hummed to the sky earlier.

Iwaizumi’s hand sets down on the ship, and it looks wrong somehow, like the angle of his hand doesn’t match the surface it’s resting against as Tooru perceives it.

Well, Iwaizumi did say that his real shape would give a human a headache. It makes sense that his ship doesn’t make sense to look at. Tooru reaches out to touch it, too, and recoils instantly - the thing is buzzing, vibrating so quiet and low and yet enough to send a shiver all the way up his arm in an instant. But it’s just surprising, not unpleasant - putting his entire palm flat against the surface makes the sensation spread in a slow, rolling wave across his whole body, and it almost feels good, actually.

Aside from that feeling, it’s perfectly smooth; cold and hard, as if made of rock.

Which is exactly what Tooru anticipates.

“I knew it,” he repeats, and this time he’s talking about the confirmation that his chunk of the sky came from this ship - from his Iwa-chan’s ship.

Iwaizumi makes that noise again - he harmonises with himself, somehow, and Tooru can’t understand it, or even tell if it’s in a language as opposed to just being a noise, but he wants to hear more of it, if he can. This time, instead of a whole construct appearing from nowhere, all the stars that spackle the ship move across it, gathering in front of the two of them in a nearly-rectangular shape that glows a soft white. Maybe pale green, if he tilts his head right.

Iwa-chan is smiling - almost like he can’t stop himself, it beams out of his face a thousand times brighter than the rings around his head or the shape lit up on the side of his ship. It’s a little overwhelming, really. He so rarely smiles so openly and without restraint. Tooru can’t help but smile back. If his stomach does a happy little flip it’s no-one’s business but his own. If his heart beats harder in his chest at that unabashed joy on his best friend’s face, there are plenty of reasons he can use to justify that.

“Would you like to see inside?” Iwaizumi asks, and Tooru almost falls over his own feet.

“Is that even a question?” he asks, mouth agape. Iwaizumi gestures, and it finally clicks that this shape made out of light is an entrance: a door.

He tries to rest his hand on it, and sure enough, the surface isn’t there where the light has gathered; his hand just keeps going.

His heart pounds for a different reason, now.

This is… big, right? This, he’s realising, is a big deal. He’s pretty sure Iwa-chan is wrong about there not being any other aliens on Earth at all, so he’s harbouring no illusions about being the first human on board an alien ship, but still -- but still! He’s not about to brush off the importance of this moment.

There’s a voice at the back of his head reminding him that he has no guarantee that this is safe. That he’s about to go headfirst into a completely new, unknowable situation, and that even if Iwaizumi has stated directly that he would never intentionally hurt Tooru, that his species has no interest in that sort of thing whatsoever, but - he’s lied to him as long as he’s known him, hasn’t he? Why not about this, too?

But that cautious voice always sounds like Iwa-chan, is the thing.

So he says fuck it to himself and steps forward.

There’s a few seconds - several - where he’s just blinking, trying to get his eyes to adjust. It’s no use, really; even when he’s used to the brighter environment, he can’t get a grip on what it looks like, exactly.

The interior of the ship is the same undefinable colour as the rings of light that hang around Iwaizumi’s head - to Tooru’s eyes it almost looks white, but something about it keeps shifting, like a heat-haze, like he can’t quite pin the colour itself down by looking at it. He blinks again and it’s every colour at once, somehow, and his brain can’t properly comprehend that, either, so it goes back to seeing it as white, as pale green; a shifting visual paradox.

He’s starting to understand why Iwa-chan’s parents get headaches looking at his real shape.

On the matter of shapes, however - it seems he’s just in a room. Despite the impossible colour of it, and the glow everything gives off, it just looks like a very familiar --

“Oh, shit, sorry -” Iwaizumi says, coming in behind him, and then lets out a series of overlapping tones that go together into a strange, short tune, and which make Tooru shiver, and the lights dim. Not into full darkness - the glow of most of the room just turns off, retreats away and up to a single point on the ceiling, which he doesn’t have to look at at all. It’s much easier to see now that the rest of the room is just --

Well, it’s just Iwa-chan’s bedroom, is the thing. It’s the same room Tooru’s been in countless times, slept over in since childhood.

Tooru can feel the way his own eyebrows draw together, can feel the unpleasant wrinkle this revelation forms across his forehead and can do nothing to stop it.

It takes him the normal two steps to cross the room to the window, where he throws the curtains open - sure enough, it’s the same view across to his own home, his own bedroom window directly opposite. He can see the pyjamas he left strewn across his bed this morning.

A sudden dizziness overwhelms him. Luckily he already knows the exact angle to let himself fall into a sitting position on the edge of Iwa-chan’s bed.

Iwaizumi at least has the decency to look a little ashamed when he points an accusing finger at him.

“You teleported me,” he states, as steadily as he can. He’s trying to frown, still, but the truth of those words is pushing a smile onto his face already. “We just teleported.”

Iwa-chan opens his mouth like he wants to argue, so Tooru jabs his finger in his direction again and he closes it. And then opens it again, because apparently he likes knowing more than Tooru does about alien technology and lording it over him.

“It’s more like - like folding space, actually,” he tries to explain. At least his explanation is fairly useless. Tooru is appalled at this very concept, that Iwa-chan knows - and has always known - more about UFOs, and aliens, and space itself, than him. That all this time that he’s been rambling on about things he’s known for sure must be facts, Iwa-chan has known exactly how right or wrong he’s been, and said and done nothing except to help him retrain some of those energies onto volleyball.

“Iwa-chan, you’re not allowed to laugh at me for not knowing things, and getting things wrong,” he hears himself saying before he can stop himself, and his voice comes out small and distant.

“What,” Iwaizumi says, and he’s sat beside Tooru in an instant, and his hands are hovering like he wants to take Tooru’s hands in his but isn’t sure if he’s allowed that any more. The familiar crease between his eyebrows deepens, and Tooru wants to take those hands, wants to make sure Iwaizumi knows he still can, always can, will always be allowed. He can’t do it, though; even with Iwaizumi right there by his side there’s suddenly such a gap between them, and he doesn’t know how to start bridging it. They’d started to, leaning on each other, sat on the ridge, but now that they’re indoors and the star’s song is quietened beyond glass, and they’re here so suddenly, all Tooru can find himself thinking about is how long Iwa-chan’s room might be left empty.

“That’s not - Oikawa, I wouldn’t.,” Iwaizumi insists, and Tooru knows he’s telling the truth. “I’m not laughing at you. You know that, right?”

Tooru nods. He does know that. It’s not the real issue at all, and he’s pretty sure Iwa-chan knows it too. For all that he’s the smart one of the pair of them (and the pretty one, and the talented one, and more besides), Iwa-chan at least isn’t stupid when it comes to Tooru’s feelings. Even when Tooru’s being selfish, even if it’s silly things, Iwa-chan will always - in his own, blunt, irritable way - always, one way or the other, do what’s best to ground Tooru, to remind him that he’s loved, that he’s okay. That he’s just ‘okay’, sometimes, when his ego is swelling, no matter how much he might disagree with Iwa-chan on that one. That ‘okay’ is okay, too.

It’s why Tooru lo-- keeps him around, after all. Plus that they’re inseparable best friends, of course.

But there it is again, is the thing - inseparable.

The most important and hardest thing he’s had to learn tonight is that they’re very, very separable, actually.

He doesn’t want to tell Iwa-chan that. It’ll only make him feel worse for something that he’s clearly just as unhappy about, something he can’t help at all.

“I know,” he says, instead, and takes one of those half-reaching hands in his own. Something about physically feeling Iwa-chan’s presence is a comfort of sorts. “I’m just - being silly.”

“No, it’s,” Iwaizumi shakes his head. “You’re fine.”

It’s almost worse that he’s so accepting of Tooru’s upset; that he probably anticipated this, and probably other scenarios, too, where Tooru might have reacted really badly; that Iwa-chan seems like he was prepared for total rejection after opening up like this.

He’s not really sure how he’s managing to react so well and handle all of this at all, really. He can’t imagine completely denying this and pushing Iwaizumi away, even with such earth-shattering revelations, but despite the difficulties he’s having, Tooru thinks he’s doing quite well, somehow. Probably a lot of stuff getting bottled up for later.

Instead of worrying about that, he changes the subject.

“So - explain,” he demands. Iwa-chan’s brow furrows, and he pokes at the wrinkle to smooth it out. “Is the ship something that you can use to step from place to place, _not unlike teleportation_ , and you chose your bedroom because it’s familiar and safe, or is the ship in the forest just a - a gate, that leads to the actual ship, which is your bedroom, and therefore I’ve been in an alien ship countless times before, or… what?”

Iwa-chan’s mouth twists in thought. His eyes are starting to glow again, but Tooru doesn’t point it out. Maybe if he doesn’t notice, more and more of Iwaizumi’s real shape will show, and Tooru will get to see it properly. He doesn’t mind so much if he gets a headache. Seems worth the risk, to get to see something like that.

Despite the strangeness of the rings of light and the soft green lamp-eyes, the way Iwa-chan presses his mouth together as he figures out what he wants to say is the same as it’s ever been. It's more of a comfort than Tooru will admit even to himself.

“Somewhere between the two?” he ventures carefully, after a few seconds. “You're right about it being a door. And technically it could be used like a teleporter in some ways, but only within a radius of… a few hundred thousand miles?”

Only a few hundred thousand. Tooru raises his eyebrows and purses his lips and says nothing, to make sure Iwa-chan knows to be ashamed of himself for that.

“That’s barely beyond the moon, Oikawa,” he tries to point out, so Tooru just raises his eyebrows even higher, and he gives up, tossing his hands up in defeat and rolling his eyes. “Anyway it's not like I can just use it to hop anywhere: it can only be tuned to one place at once, and it sort of - creates an enclosed space. Or fits to what's there, I guess. And that becomes the ship's interior. Which is my room at the moment.”

“How does it work?” Tooru keeps his next question simple. He can interrogate the details out once he has the basics.

“Uh, I have to like, harmonise and create an echo-loop in the place I want to set up the link--”

“Not that!” Although the image of Iwa-chan singing to his ship is - not altogether unappealing. “How does the ‘door’ work? What's the science behind going from the forest to your house in one step? You said it folds space? Explain!”

He can hear his pitch steadily rising, but he can't stop himself. He needs to understand at least this much. If he can get this, then he can be a little more comfortable with how little he knows about the universe. Can start looking at this as an opportunity to learn more.

“Uh,” says Iwaizumi, though. His face is studiously blank. It's the exact expression he wears when they're quizzing each other while studying for exams and he has no idea where to start with a problem but doesn't want Tooru to call him out on it.

“You don't _know_?”

“It's not like you have to know how a car works to drive it--"

“I know how a _car_ works, Iwa-chan, it is an exceedingly simple machine and even more so in the face of technology that can unfold from literally nothing to fill a large space, transport you across a huge distance in an instant, and presumably fly!”

Iwaizumi mumbles something that sounds an awful lot like “yeah it can fly". At least he has the good sense to do that quietly so Tooru can pretend he didn't hear that - because, wow, flying - and just keep glaring.

For a moment, Iwaizumi looks like he might actually back down for once in their lives, but he matches Tooru’s frown with his own.

His eyelashes are casting shadows on his cheekbones because of the glow of his own eyes.

Tooru is struck by a terrible urge.

“All I need to know is how to work it,” Iwa-chan insists, jaw set stubbornly, his words thankfully distracting from the immediacy of Tooru’s impulses. “I was like, five when I flew it last, it's not like I could be expected to know all the technical details when I had settling here to worry about. And since then I've been focusing on my, uh, Earth studies, so…”

Regrettable as it is for Tooru to acknowledge it, he makes a good point.

He makes a show of humming long and cynical, and heaves a dramatic sigh.

“Fine,” he concedes. Squeezes Iwa-chan’s hand gently. “But you have to find out, so you can tell me when you get back, okay?”

Iwa-chan’s expression freezes at the reminder that he's leaving, then softens into a smile.

“Deal,” he agrees, and squeezes back. “And if you want, you can be there when I re-tune the ship to itself? It's weird, you get to be in two places at once for a bit.”

Tooru can feel his eyes light up at that last part.

“So it's quantum?” The question spills out too-excited, but instead of getting frustrated, Iwa-chan’s smile just gets softer; the teeth that bite at his lower lip in an attempt to stop it are sharp and silvery and pearlescent.

“Probably?” he ventures, still visibly trying to fight down his smile.

Given time and a notebook or three, Tooru wants to believe he could figure it out himself. He's not about to go so far as to assume he could figure out all the technical details, or replicate it even a little bit, but surely it wouldn't be completely beyond him to at least have a basic grasp of the concepts.

But as much as that's caught his attention, it's not what he wants to focus on at all.

Right now, the important thing is how warm and safe Iwa-chan’s hand is in his, and how soft the look in his eyes is. All four of them.

Tooru’s pretty sure that the concept of extra eyes is usually supposed to be gross, or frightening, at least in most of the fiction he's encountered. Instead he's reminded of those few short weeks, years ago, when he'd gotten so caught up in a theory about aliens lending weight to descriptions and depictions of biblical angels.

“Is it like, difficult to pull all that in and look human?” he asks, gesturing at Iwaizumi’s face. “Has it been a total pain this whole time?”

“Not really,” Iwaizumi shrugs. “It's pretty natural for me at this point. I think of it as much my body as how I look originally, really.” He pauses, shrugs again. “Feels kinda good to let a halo or two out, though. Kinda comfier? Comforting? I dunno.”

He even calls those rings of light halos, Tooru realises with a start, and suddenly he can't be sure if he dropped that angel theory because of a lack of continued interest or because Iwa-chan said something dismissive. He supposes that doesn't matter now.

“Bit more than a couple of halos, Iwa-chan,” he teases. There’s three around his head now, and one looping around each wrist.

Finally noticing that he's showing almost as much of himself as he did earlier, on the ridge, Iwa-chan blushes, and the blush is a pale glow across his cheekbones and brighter at the long, splitting tips of his ears. And then it’s just a normal human blush, and he’s back to two eyes as he hides himself away.

Tooru finds himself pulled forward almost by instinct, leaning towards Iwa-chan and reaching out as if to grab --

As if to grab what? The intangible halos that his hand passes through anyway? Iwa-chan’s shirt or shoulder or hand? As if his touch alone could stop whatever ridiculous quantum alien magic that lets Iwaizumi disguise himself as human.

His hand falls, hovering uselessly, but he’s still sat at an angle that makes Iwa-chan have to tip his chin up a little to meet his eyes properly.

Their faces are so close.

Iwaizumi speaks before Tooru can muster up a single word.

“You wanna see, huh?”

He nods, a little breathless. The thing is that even without his glowy alien accoutrements, Iwa-chan’s face so close to his own still makes something flutter and flicker between Tooru’s ribs. Usually he’s so much better at keeping that in check.

Iwa-chan is the one who breaks the too-close, too-intense eye contact, looking down at his lap, eyes darting back and forth as he scratches the shell of his ear in thought. By the time he looks back up at Tooru, he’s sat back a little, so they’re more than a breath apart. His expression is terribly serious, but then it often is.

“Can you promise me you’ll tell me to stop if it starts hurting you in any way, or if you’re uncomfortable, or--”

He lapses back into quiet as Tooru squeezes his hand and gives him the most reassuring smile he can summon.

“I promise,” he says, and means it. That doesn’t mean he won’t push his own limits if he needs to, but he’ll at least try not to let himself get brain damage or something just because he’s curious about what a real live actual alien looks like.

God, he’s about to see a real live actual alien, looking like a real live actual alien, as opposed to looking like his childhood friend.

He tries not to think too hard on the fact that he’s seen an alien almost every day since he was five, even if he never looked like one.

Iwa-chan looks over him carefully, like he’s trying to assess how honest Tooru is being (he bats his eyelashes as winsome and sweet as he can), then nods and stands up. His fingertips trail against Tooru’s palm as their hands let go of one another. Or maybe he just wants to see it that way.

“Uh,” Iwa-chan says, and starts taking off his shirt.

“Why, Iwa-chan,” Tooru coos, barely thinking before he speaks. “I’m already excited enough about all this, there’s no need to add to that by getting your tits out.”

“Dumbass.” The shirt hits him in the face and he giggles helplessly. “I don’t wanna rip my uniform just for this. Besides, you wanted to see properly, right?”

It’s not like Tooru hasn’t seen Iwaizumi’s body plenty of times before. All else aside, it’s impossible to totally avoid seeing each other in the locker room, even if he didn’t want to look anyway. No one’s ever noticed him sneaking intentional glances - at least, no one’s ever called him out on it. Even the few times Makki and Mattsun have tried to accuse him of harbouring a secret crush on his best friend, they’ve never brought it up, so he has to assume he’s always been able to get away with it without anyone seeing. That or they just assume the subtle peering is out of envy, rather than attraction, and are too polite to mention it. It’s a fair guess, or would be, if either of them did think that.

Iwa-chan kicks off his shoes and socks, and Tooru’s fingers curl in the fabric of the shirt that’s fallen into his lap as he starts to unbelt his pants.

He’s not doing it sexily at all, and Tooru has half a mind to leer at him and encourage him to tart it up a little, but Iwa-chan’s ears are so red and he’s looking anywhere but at Tooru as he slides his legs free, and all of a sudden his mouth is so dry that the words stick in his throat.

“I’m gonna, uh--” Still not looking up, he throws the pants onto the bed next to Tooru, who has to fight an overwhelming urge to pull them onto his lap to clutch at, too. “Leave my boxers on, since, uh. Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Tooru manages to respond, which isn’t really what he wants to say. He pulls himself together a little, teeth digging into the inside of his cheek. “They’re real cute, after all; wouldn’t wanna lose that aspect of this show.”

Iwaizumi goes redder, but he’s got his frown back, and it’s directed right at Tooru, which makes this whole situation far more comfortable somehow.

He wasn’t lying. It is cute that Iwa-chan has boxers emblazoned with King Ghidorah’s terribly impressive wingspan and countenances. It’s especially cute, he decides, now that he knows that Earth isn’t even Iwaizumi’s home, that he has such strong affection for movies focusing on the defense and protection and balance of this planet.

It occurs to him, just as quickly as he can squash the thought, that Iwaizumi’s true anatomy might have certain aspects in common with the kaiju displayed across his left hip.

“Somehow this feels like the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done,” Iwaizumi admits, and Tooru can understand that being stood in his underwear about to bare himself in a far more secret way than any human could possibly comprehend, might make anyone a little self-conscious. Still, it shouldn’t get in Iwa-chan’s way this easily.

He rests his chin on his hand and smiles up at his best friend in the whole world.

“More embarrassing than--”

He hasn’t actually thought of anything yet, so he’s grateful when Iwa-chan cuts him off.

“I see how it is,” he comments, voice dry and cutting and just a little louder than Tooru’s own. “You don’t want to see at all.”

“Nooooo,” Tooru wails, as pouty and whiny as he can make himself. “No, Iwa-chan, I wanna see! More than anything!”

His mind immediately supplies him with several other things he does want more, actually, and he shoves each and every one of those thoughts aside. Now isn’t the time for any of that.

Besides, it seems his incredibly wily plan has gone exactly as intended - all the tension and embarrassment has left Iwa-chan’s posture, replaced with his usual annoyance at Tooru’s shenanigans. It’s particularly sneaky because even if Iwaizumi realises what he’s doing, it’ll only annoy him more, further eliminating any self-consciousness.

“Nope, too late, give me my shirt back,” Iwa-chan insists, holding out his hand, but the glint in his eyes means he’s joking, so Tooru can clutch the shirt to his chest and stick his tongue out in refusal.

Iwaizumi pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath.

“Oikawa,” he says, voice forced flat and irritated.

“Iwa-chaaaan,” Tooru replies, gleeful. “Show me, please? I really wanna see.”

The ‘please’ slips out without him even thinking about it. Usually he’d drag something like this out by being as obnoxious and bratty as possible and letting Iwa-chan get as pissed off as he needs to.

But the thing is, he does really want to see.

The very barest hints of what Iwa-chan’s real self looks like that he’s already seen have been eerie and beautiful and fascinating - there’s no biological explanation that he can think of for the halos, but after all he only knows terrestrial biology, and only at a high-school level at that. It’s interesting from a scientific standpoint, as well as from the point of view of a teenage boy who has never stopped believing in aliens.

More importantly, Iwaizumi is Tooru’s best friend. There is absolutely no situation in which he wouldn’t want to see what he actually looked like, unless Iwa-chan genuinely, actually didn’t want him to see. And there isn’t a single reason Tooru can think of that would hold up in that case: even if he were ugly or frightening it wouldn’t change the fact that he’s Tooru’s Iwa-chan, after all. There’s no way he could be repulsed by his favourite person in the world.

(That thought passes under his radar for now, and only comes back to echo at him and fluster him later)

Iwaizumi is still hesitating.

“You’ll say, if--”

“I promised already, Iwa-chan!” Tooru insists. “You can take it as slow as you need but you already stripped for me, so you might as well get on with it.” He bats his eyelashes up at Iwaizumi, cheshire-grinning. “Not that I’m not enjoying the view as is, of course.”

This earns him an eye-roll and a loud huff through Iwa-chan’s nose. It’s not like he was lying, though. Iwaizumi is -- in good shape. Not that he’s going to let himself think too hard on that while they’re in the same room beyond a normal level of appreciation for aesthetics and fitness.

“I’ll take it step by step, so let me know if anything hurts, okay?”

Now it’s Tooru’s turn to flush pink. Surely that had to have been on purpose.

Luckily for him, Iwa-chan is looking away from him again as he starts to hum.

With the song coming from the stars quieter and further away, now, it’s so much easier to hear, to pick out the low, soft tones vibrating in Iwaizumi’s throat. Tooru can’t remember if he’s ever heard him sing, not even along with the radio or anything, but now he really hopes he gets to at some point. He tucks the thought away for later, and tries not to think about how much later it might end up being.

The humming, to Tooru’s intense disappointment, doesn’t last. Seems it’s just a trigger to start off the shift in appearance, rather than something that needs to be sustained - which makes sense, considering how Iwa-chan’s features have been fluctuating for the last… god, barely an hour, really. Less than that.

He’s not sure how his brain is so easily able to parse that, either. Yes, it’s the most sensible, logical explanation, connecting the dots between the star-songs, and the almost musical tones Iwaizumi used to call and open his ship, and this, but he really feels like he ought to be freaking out more about it. About the whole situation.

The thought occurs to him for barely half a second before he gets distracted again by the way his best friend’s familiar appearance is changing right in front of him. As his second pair of eyes open, so does his chest, somehow, like the clear, pale green _something_ is pushing its way out of his skin above his sternum. It looks like glass, or rock, and it’s just - wedged in there, seemingly painlessly, like it’s just part of him. Which it is, he supposes.

“Iwa-chan?”

Any shifting of skin or brightening of glows halts immediately. All four of Iwaizumi’s eyes are wide with concern, but Tooru puts his hands up reassuringly.

“You okay?” Iwaizumi asks anyway. He nods, as enthusiastic and positive as he can manage.

“I was just wondering if--” The words tumble out of his mouth, and for a moment he almost tries to stop himself from asking anything at all. No, best to just redirect his question. “If it’d be okay for me to touch?”

Iwaizumi’s frozen expression reflects Tooru’s own surprise at what he just said.

That’s so much worse than asking if it hurts - that’s so much more intrusive and weird and -

“Uh, sure,” Iwa-chan says, shrugging.

His ears are as red as Tooru has to assume his own face is. But he has permission, now, and, well. He _does_ want to touch.

The only thing is that he’d want to even without all the new alien anatomy.

As long as he can do this without letting on too badly how into this he is, this could all work out just fine, he tells himself as he stands and steps across the room to get right up in Iwa-chan’s business. He just has to feel Iwa-chan up without making him uncomfortable. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.

The moment before his fingers make contact, he’s suddenly convinced that the pale-green protrusion is going to be soft, like jelly, or _organs_ , and it takes all his willpower not to hesitate, not to seem afraid or disgusted or even nervous. He can’t help the relief in his exhale when his fingers meet solid rock, or glass, or whatever this thing is. There’s more of whatever-it-is now, in the hollow of Iwaizumi’s throat and peeking out from his collarbones. His skin is soft and human and warm as ever where it meets these hard, almost translucent additions. They’re almond-shaped - eye-shaped, almost, but not eyes. More like fingernails, maybe, in the way they come out of Iwaizumi’s skin.

They’re warm, too, the same body temperature as the rest of Iwa-chan, a gentle reminder that these are as much a part of him as his hands, or his eyes. Which he has six of, now; extra pairs above and below the usual two.

All of them are fixed on Tooru’s face, making him feel strangely pinned-down, even though he knows full well it’s only one person looking at him.

“What are these?” he asks, fingertips cupping the glass-rock-thing at Iwa-chan’s sternum with as much care as possible. Just because it feels hard doesn’t mean Iwaizumi can’t feel him touching it, after all.

Tooru really needs to work on his internal phrasing.

“Uh, they’re-” Iwa-chan pauses, presses his lips together tight, and for a few moments, Tooru thinks he’s taking time to think about it, until he brings up a hand - each finger longer and paling to a colour that Tooru is starting to think he might just be interpreting as green so that his human brain can comprehend it, and ending in a curved claw of the same substance Tooru is touching right now - to his mouth, and it comes away wet. The wetness is glowing and pale, but it still has the same consistency as human blood.

“Ow,” Iwaizumi says. Now that Tooru is looking, his teeth are as sharp as he’d noticed earlier, and silvery. “I forgot to adjust. Not used to, uh. Not having a human mouth.”

Right; he’d said earlier that he thought of his human body as himself as much as whatever he _actually_ looks like. It makes sense that he wouldn’t be accustomed to his real shape, but something about that just makes Tooru smile. It makes him clumsy in a way Tooru isn’t sure he’s ever seen him, and that - and the way he’s pouting with his eyes a little crossed - is distressingly cute to see.

It’s such a natural response to him, so everyday and normal that he doesn’t even take a second to consider the context before asking.

“Aw, Iwa-chan, you want me to kiss it better?”

There’s no need to freeze up after, he tells himself as the context actually does start to sink in. It’s something he’d say any other day, in any other situation that Iwa-chan wound up with a minor injury, even biting his tongue. It’s fine, for him to have said that, even if one of them is mostly naked and they’ve been weirdly, quietly intimate in small ways tonight. Even if they do have limited time left together.

“Maybe later,” Iwaizumi responds, voice low and quiet. His blush is glowing right to the long, split tips of his ears, which is normal, but he’s not shouting, or throwing anything at Tooru, which isn’t, and he --

He successfully distracts Tooru by opening yet another pair of eyes, and draws his attention by tracing a claw over some of the green substance in the hollow of his collarbone. Tooru’s face is warm, but he does his best to pay attention. He can’t let something like that distract him now. He can’t dwell on that, and wonder what he means by it, if he means anything by it, if he really --

“Anyway, it’s sort of like bone, I guess,” Iwa-chan is saying, and he wrenches his focus back to his words. “But my equivalent of a heart is made of the same stuff, and it’s what I use to echo my native language with when I need to get louder. And it’s not what my actual bones are made of, either, when I’m in a between-shape, so… huh, I guess I don’t know how better to define it. It’s called--” He makes three ringing tones that go up in pitch, and the part of him that Tooru is touching vibrates with the sound, in the same way he’s felt his own throat vibrate when he speaks. It sends a shiver up from his fingertips to his elbows. “But I don’t know how to translate that, really. It’s crystalline in structure, I guess, so--”

Tooru rolls his eyes, and hums back the same notes.

All of Iwa-chan’s eyes widen in surprise.

“It’s not the same,” Tooru admits, but he can’t hold back the self-satisfied grin at so simply outwitting the other boy. “But I can at least do this much. Come on, have a little faith in me.”

He taps Iwaizumi on the nose, and the other boy at least has the good graces to look a little embarrassed.

“Alright, alright,” he bats Tooru’s hand away. “I am not teaching you the whole language though. Even if you could make all the noises, it’d take way too long.”

“Just little, useful things?” He bats his eyelashes.

The hesitation feels a little forced, like Iwa-chan is trying really hard to make himself seem reluctant.

“Fine, but you’re not allowed to use it where other people could hear me instinctively replying like an idiot and figure it out.”

“I wouldn’t!” Tooru insists, hand pressed to his heart in mock-offense. Iwaizumi fixes him with a look, and its four times as intense with all those eyes. “Well, I won’t now, even if it would only have been around the team, who would all be totally accepting and lovely about it anyway.”

“Hmm,” Iwa-chan says, instead of anything constructive, which Tooru knows means ‘I want to argue but I can’t actually prove you wrong’, which means Tooru wins this round, even if he is going to keep that promise anyway.

Iwaizumi changes the subject by letting himself get even more alien. Tooru can’t figure out how it happens: there’s a sort of shimmery feeling around Iwa-chan, and it _does_ hurt his head a little bit, but only because he has to focus to not let his eyes slide over that shimmer, and certainly not enough to stop this entire process just yet.

It’s like - one moment there’s nothing there, and the next, almost as if he’d blinked, except he _knows_ he didn’t, there’s the same silvery, iridescent bone-stuff that Iwa-chan’s teeth are made of winding around his torso, as if some of his ribs have relocated outside of his body. But not like that at all; they’re more like - branches, he tells himself, as his hands curiously feel along them and find them solid and inflexible, not like any other potential alien appendage he might have been halfway-anticipating. Like branches, the way they interlock and frame the - three-ascending-tones - that hold Iwa-chan’s voice. They come away from his back, too, and there, they really do look like branches, spreading up and apart, splitting into smaller and smaller and --

Okay, that really does make his head hurt a bit, because he can see the ends of them if he looks straight at them, but when he tries to follow the lines of them outwards from Iwa-chan’s back, they just keep going, fractalling endlessly.

It doesn’t make sense, and he can’t stop looking, has to forcibly drag his eyes away, back to Iwaizumi’s face, which, despite all the eyes and all the teeth, is still Iwa-chan’s face. He can’t figure out if that’s just because Iwa-chan hasn’t actually let many proper changes show yet, or if his brain is just coping by interpreting what he’s seeing as his best friend’s familiar face. Either way, it’s sort of reassuring to see.

There’s more branches curling out from behind his ears, across his temples and then further up, looping elegantly around his halos. Like horns - antlers, or a crown.

They’re pretty, but they don’t distract from the concern creasing Iwaizumi’s forehead.

“You doing okay?”

Oops, he’s let it show. That, or Iwa-chan just knows him well enough to recognise when he’s in even a small amount of pain, which, considering everything, is far more likely.

“I’m fine,” he insists, because he is, as long as he doesn’t let his eyes follow the fractals. “I’m just surprised you haven’t gotten any taller alongside all these terribly strange and fascinating additions, is all.”

The forehead crease is the same, but now it’s irritation, rather than concern, which was entirely the point. Tooru tries not to look too smug, and is fully aware that he’s failing on that front.

“If I could be taller,” Iwa-chan grumps, “I would be.”

“I’m sure you would,” Tooru reassures him, and pats him on the head in the way he knows he hates.

It’s almost funny that nothing about their interactions is different, really, but in all fairness, Iwa-chan still looks mostly human so far. Tooru can’t tell if he’s holding back intentionally - because he’s nervous that Tooru will be repulsed, or because he wants to keep him safe -  or subconsciously, or if this is just the natural progression of things and if he just has a little more patience, before he knows it, his best friend will be unrecognisably alien in appearance.

He keeps his mouth shut, and does his best to be good and not rush these things.

“What are you thinking?” Iwaizumi asks exactly as he steels his resolve, because of course he does.

Well, if that’s how he’s going to be about it.

“Oh, nothing,” he declares, pushing airiness into his tone, looking up and down Iwa-chan the same way he examines his cuticles when he’s being as nonchalant as he possibly can. “Just wondering if you were exaggerating, and you’re actually from a humanoid species like the designs I occasionally favour, the kind you always make fun of for being unimaginative.”

Another eye opens with a ringing sound that Tooru can feel in his chest. This one isn’t attached to Iwaizumi’s body at all, instead suspended in the air above his head; it doesn’t have visible eyelids or lashes, but it’s narrowed at him anyway as if it did. It sheds a soft glow on short, dark hair, which really doesn’t look nearly as short or as dark as usual, actually, but it’s impossible to tell if that’s an actual change or just a trick of the light that comes off his halos and sort of drips from this newest eye. He has the feeling it would be looking at him no matter what angle he approached Iwa-chan from, and wonders if he can see through it even if it’s not visible to the human eye.

It’d be an advantage in volleyball, he muses, pushing aside any thoughts of other things something like that might be used for.

He feels the hum before he hears it.

It resonates through his bones, makes his fingers numb, makes the air around Iwaizumi swim with colour.

“I am trying,” Iwaizumi says through gritted teeth, and the hum doesn’t let up as he speaks, because of course it doesn’t. It presses on his skull like nothing he’s ever felt. He’s frozen in place, hands tightening on Iwaizumi’s arm and side where they’d been absently following along his silvery branches. “I am trying to take this as slow as possible, so I don’t hurt you, and so you can adjust to this, because even if you seem calm I know there’s no way anyone could actually be in a situation like this. It’s difficult and I’m already struggling to concentrate with your hands all over me. And you - you’re really gonna try and goad me into this, Oikawa?”

It would be smart, at this point, for Tooru to back down. To let Iwa-chan do this as slow as he needed. To not encourage possible physical harm to himself.

But more than the low noise that still hums in and around him, something about Iwa-chan’s words, about the particular phrasing, combined with that almost-growl of what he knows is irritation but can almost pretend is something else entirely - it sends heat coursing through him, rippling up his spine and settling in the pit of his stomach.

Something wild and bright and thumping hard in his chest takes a hold of him, and he leans closer, eyes fixed on the pair of eyes he’s most accustomed to. It feels like when he’s mid-match, staring down through the net; his heart pounds; his mouth twists into something like a smile; his breath comes short.

“Well,” and his voice comes out a vicious purr. “I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself on my account. Why not just... let go for me, Iwa-chan?” He drags out the syllables of the nickname as he looses his grip, fingers trailing down Iwaizumi’s wrist and exposed stomach.

It’s Iwaizumi who’s frozen now, all nine of his eyes wide and fixed on Tooru’s two, lips parted - and barely inches away, and -

Tooru watches his jaw set, and his eyebrows draw back together, and for a second it feels like this is going to turn into a shouting match, which only ever happens when they argue about really serious things - and this is serious, of course it is, and Tooru feels stupid, but he’s not going to back down, or give up, he’s not, he wants, he really wants --

There’s an instant - less than a second, a blink, barely anything, but long enough. An instant, and Iwa-chan’s solid flesh under his hands twists, and he sees something incomprehensible, and impossible to describe with words, bright and endless and deeply, truly recognisable and familiar even though he’s never seen anything like it before in his life.

And then Iwa-chan is entirely human again, and it’s just them, as usual, in his ordinary human bedroom, and Tooru realises he’s fallen on his ass only as Iwa-chan moves past him to pick a pair of sweatpants up from off the floor where he probably left them that morning and steps into them like nothing just happened.

“I need to piss,” he announces to the air, and leaves Tooru alone on the floor, out of breath and dizzy and helplessly, hopelessly, somehow smiling.


End file.
